Oxide: A Formal Semantics for Rust - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00982 <comment><USER2> > Rust is a major advancement in industrial programming languages due in large > part to its success in bridging the gap between low-level systems > programming and high-level application programming

So glad to see this sentiment echoed somewhere outside my own head/conversations. Rust is a game changer, it brings something novel (ownership/borrowing, research-grade type system) to systems programming, _and_ it brings great features for high level programming (type inference, strict control, high level abstraction support, "zero-cost" abstractions), and is basically a paragon of good open-source development in the open.

On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla, with so much less resources than other companies, and a demonstrated interest in making software that's good for everyone.

<comment><USER3> > On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla

IIRC it's open-source with a fairly wide set of contributors, with Mozilla being a major one, rather than Mozilla being the "owners" of Rust.

Not arguing your point, and there's a chance I'm awfully wrong, but as I recall it, Mozilla are more the champions of the language rather than the owner of it.

Regardless, it's a really neat language

<comment><USER4> That's correct; we operate on consensus, and about a hundred people are involved in Rust governance. Only about six are employees of Mozilla.

<comment><USER2> TIL - to what extent does Mozilla still sponsor rust? Looking at the governance docs[0], there's no mention of Mozilla anywhere at all. This taken with the fact there are less than 10 people in a hundred from mozilla makes it pretty clear that rust has come a long way from being a mozilla research project (which I guess should have been obvious to me as well).

What is the extent of support from mozilla? I can't find a list of other corporate sponsors?

[0]: [https://www.rust-lang.org/governance](https://www.rust- lang.org/governance)

<comment><USER4> Mozilla pays for those people to work on Rust full time; they hire individuals for short-term contracts for specific work; they pay the CI and hosting bills. They also provide legal support.

Some other companies do sponsor work at times as well. A recent hot topic of discussion is "does a Rust foundation make sense", there are good arguments for and against. We'll see.

Oh, and note that that number is people who are decision makers in the project; about 120~150 distinct people contribute to each six-week release. We've had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that's only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn't produce a commit.

<comment><USER5> > We've had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that's only to rust- > lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any > of the other kinds of work that doesn't produce a commit.

To put this into more context: a lot of the code shipped with the Rust toolchain does not live in rust-lang/rust.

Some parts of the standard library (HashMap, HashSet, C FFI, intrinsics, etc.) are used as dependencies. All of the tools (the linter, language server, rustfmt, rustup, cargo, etc.) are dependencies. Many compiler components like miri (constant evaluator), chalk (type queries), polonius (borrow checking), etc. are also dependencies. The Cranelift code generation backend can be dynamically used and does not live in rust-lang/rust, etc. Then there is the RFC repository, and probably other things.

Counting contributors for such a distributed infrastructure isn't easy, but the number of contributors to rust-lang/rust isn't super meaningful.

One might be able to do better by finding commits to rust-lang/rust that update "Rust" submodules (e.g. not LLVM), and adding the contributors to those repos from the last update. One might also want to find commits that update versions of rust-lang/rust dependencies, and for those that live in the rust project (or that have dependencies there), count the contributors from the last version, etc.

The Rust project has seen significant modularization over the last couple of years, and the more modular it gets, the less meaningful "contributors to rust-lang/rust" becomes, and the less accurate the "Thanks!" pages of each release become.

<comment><USER4> Yep. Still want to re-do it. Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love seeing some good PL research from Northeastern in the news! I was part of the capstone class they ran back in 2015 where we used/learned the alpha version of Rust that had just been released. Great experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the examples in the paper has some code that you can't actually write in Rust, it's close to this:

        let msg: &'msg str = "Hello World";

You can write something similar and allow the compiler to infer the lifetime:

        let msg: &'_ str = "Hello World";

I often find myself declaring the type when I get into confusing type issues in Rust, but you can't do that as easily with lifetimes. With non-lexical lifetimes this has been less of an issue, but still there are times when I would like to be able to declare the lifetime like the first example.

This error example shows the valid uses of lifetimes: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/error-index.html#E0261](https://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/error-index.html#E0261)

<comment><USER8> I believe you can actually name the lifetime of a block, via the same mechanism that makes labeled breaks and continues possible.

<comment><USER7> Do you have an example of what you mean?

<comment><USER9> Like this:

      'a: {
          let a_var: u32 = 42;
          let a_ref: &'a u32 = &a_var;
      } //    ^^^^^ only valid in 'a: {}

<comment><USER10> That doesn't compile with "use of undeclared lifetime name `'a`"

<comment><USER4> You can name loop labels like this, but you cannot use them to introduce actual lifetimes, that's right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please correct me if I am wrong.

They produced a simpler modified version of Rust called Oxide that focused on ownership and borrowing.

They did did so they could translate it to a formal system and validate it in an easy to understand way.

<comment><USER12> That's normal for programming language formal verification, from what I've seen. The question is always "how simplified is it", and if it's simplified to the point of uselessness. There's usually something to be learned (and often bugs to be fixed) from even the most-simplified version, but AFAICT "full" language verification is basically never done (except on toy[1] languages).

edit: [1]: "toy" implying "not intended for broad use", not any kind of "pointless" or "just for fun", to be clear. maybe there's a better term I should be using. so basically all "this language is designed to be formally verified and it does something interesting" languages fall into this category, because it's really not expected to be generally usable - it exists to demonstrate something, and at best become a feature of another language eventually.

<comment><USER5> Usually these inform tools that can be used to detect rule violations.

For example, the rust constant evaluator can execute almost all Rust at run- time except for FFI. This allows you to write `cargo miri test` in your project, and run your unit tests in the constant evaluator.

The constant evaluator executes the program based on rules given by models like this, and if you perform an action that violates one of the rules, they report an error.

For example, this program mutates a variable while a shared borrow (which excludes mutation) is alive via a raw pointer

        fn main() {
            let mut a = 13;
            let b = &a;
            let c = b as *const _ as *mut _;
            unsafe { *c = 42; }
            println!("b = {}", b);
        }

On the playground it prints "b = 42" ([https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...](https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=6a1915616357b53e8d45d4a81c7b1bd1)).

The playground has a `Tools` button, that allows you to run the program under `miri` (the constant evaluator). When doing so, it prints:

        error[E0080]: constant evaluation error: borrow being
        accessed (Alias(None)) does not exist on the borrow stack
         --> src/main.rs:5:14
          |
        5 |     unsafe { *c = 42; }
          |              ^^^^^^^ borrow being accessed
        (Alias(None)) does not exist on the borrow stack

        error: aborting due to previous error

The error messages of the constant evaluator aren't great yet, but that basically tells you that it couldn't find a suitable mutable borrow to mutate the variable, so the access is undefined behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those of you interested in formal verification & semantics recommend you have a look at the K framework[0] that can be used for easily creating Formal Semantics.

[0]: [https://runtimeverification.com/blog/k-framework-an- overview...](https://runtimeverification.com/blog/k-framework-an-overview/)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is going to cause confusion with Rust - the game - and Oxide, its 3rd party mod plugin framework.

<comment><USER6> Rust-lang came first

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really hope there would be a ML-like syntax for Rust. The current one is not so friendly to read.

<comment><USER2> Agree -- these days whenever I try to pick between Haskell and Rust for a new project I go Haskell because of the much nicer syntax (though it took some getting used to).

I also have almost 0 interest in OCaml due to the syntactic choices they've made.

<comment><USER16> I use OCaml and I am also writing my own ML dialect, so I would like to ask, what exact aspects of the OCaml syntax don't you like, and what parts of the Haskell syntax do you like in particular? (For example, do you prefer indentation-based syntax?)

<comment><USER2> I honestly don't know how to explain it really well, but OCaml is much noisier than Haskell in my opinion. Many times when I see code snippets in OCaml they're not as nice as they look in Haskell, though they're _really_ similar. The small difference seems to snowball when the code gets increasingly complicated.

Compare functor's definitions in either syntax:

         module type FUNCTOR = sig
           type 'a t
           val map : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b t
         end;;

         class Functor where
          fmap        :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

The latter looks cleaner to me. There are other ways you could write it (for example if you turned on explicit forall it would get messier.

At this point I start skipping talks at conferences when they're in Scala because the amount of noise in the syntax is near unbearable to me (and there's likely to be a haskell talk on a similar topic) -- OCaml is much better in that respect, but I still find Haskell's syntax to be easiest on the eyes. OCaml might be more pedantically descriptive though, it seems to be more explicit about everything.

<comment><USER17> >but OCaml is much noisier than Haskell in my opinion.

I would rather say explicit, and that was a breath of fresh air to me after Haskell. As for your example, how many instances do you need to write all the type classes you need?

In OCaml I could just write all the functions I need in a file, and this file- module would implement all the signatures, thanks to the structural typing, now condiser:

        type 'a t
        val bind : 'a t -> ('a -> 'b t) -> 'b t
        val apply : ('a -> 'b) t -> 'a t -> 'b t
        val map : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a t -> 'b t
        val show : 'a t -> ('a -> string) -> string
        val return : 'a -> 'a t

instead of

        instance Functor a => Functor (Type a) where
           fmap        :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

        instance Applicative a => Applicative (Type a) where
           <*>         :: f (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

        instance Show (Type a) where
           show        :: a -> string

        instance Monad...

which is more verbose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love the name. Could not describe what it is/does any better.

</comment><comment><USER19> Gonna try Rust. Seems pretty!</comment>


Sorry, you will never ride, see or pet a cloned dinosaur | ExtremeTech - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133802-sorry-you-will-never-ride-see-or-pet-a-cloned-dinosaur <comment><USER2> To play Devil's advocate, if we gained a more complete understanding of the genome and evolution would it not be possible to take a decedent of a dinosaur and reverse engineer the original species?

</comment><comment><USER3> All imaginable inventions have already been invented.</comment>


The iPhone 5 isn't the world's thinnest smartphone, as Apple claims it to be - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgerms.com/the-iphone-5-isnt-the-worlds-thinnest-smartphone-as-apple-claims-it-to-be/

<comment><USER2> No idea whether that article is firmly tongue in cheek or not, but given that the majority of those phones either have bulges at certain points, or push outs where the camera is they're all a bit thicker than the spec sheets say.

Bit like a car manufacturer saying "Our car is <X> weight! (with no engine, transmission, gearbox, fueltank, seats, windows)", it's _true_ , but it's not correct.</comment>


Working memory revived in older adults by synchronizing rhythmic brain circuits - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0371-x <comment> Paul-ish This reminds me of a section of the book "Why we sleep"[1] that said similar techniques could enhance an older persons sleep quality. (I don't know the title of the study unfortunately.) It looks like this is an exciting area of research right now.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501...](https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501144316)

</comment><comment><USER2> Huh, I wonder if there is something similar to be studied with autistic brains.

(My step-daughter has HFA; difficulty with working memory and executive functioning is common for HFA females).

<comment><USER3> I was wondering if something like this might help with my ADHD... a thinking cap, if you will :)

<comment><USER4> There are already treatments like this.

When I was in high school I started a minor computer repair business. One of my customers was a treatment service where they would place electrodes on the head of an individual to measure certain brainwave activity. The electrodes were connected through a device back to a laptop which was playing a video.

I'm explaining it very imprecisely (I'm an expert by no means) but the way it worked is that the video would only play when the measured brainwaves met the pattern(s) established for concentration. The idea being that the person would want the video to play continuously (without pausing or chopping) so badly that their brain would train itself to enter into the "concentrating" brainwave pattern.

I'm not sure what the efficacy of the solution is but the idea was interesting at the time.

UPDATE: Just looked it up and the term they use for this is "neurofeedback" training.

Looks like there are significant criticisms to the approach and study of this treatment so maybe it isn't a viable approach after all.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback)

<comment><USER3> Neurofeedback isn't quite the same thing as neuro-stimulation. Neurofeedback just encourages (through positive feedback) the brain to stimulate itself :)

I've been practicing meditation for a few years and it has slowly but steadily improved my ability to concentrate. (Also worth mentioning that witnessing emotions as a field of sensation allows them to "dissolve" instead of getting stuck, and has helped me overcome various addictions and roadblocks.)

Meditation was shown to develop the prefrontal cortex (involved in decision- making, working memory, inhibition, emotional regulation..), which is (are) underdeveloped in people with ADHD.

I'm wondering how this kind of independent, willpower based practice compares with the constant external feedback of neurofeedback training, seeing as one of the main deficits in ADHD is self-motivation. My guess is that a combination might be most effective: train the concentrated state itself to make it more accessible, and then train the will (habit) to access it.

Or put another way, make use of both internal and external technology :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems amazing that currents < 2mA at frequencies in the low Hz do anything. That's practically DC, I guess the trick is all in synching the signals to what's going on in your head.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct- current_st...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct- current_stimulation)

<comment><USER7> I really recommend Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Neurochronometrics of Mind (A Bradford Book) by Vincent Walsh for anyone who wants a really concise view of one aspect of the field. I was super interested in this when I was in my first few years of college but the fear of electrocution pretty much dissuaded me from trying anything like building an apparatus myself.

<comment><USER8> Isn't there a commercial device built with safety mechanisms to do this?

<comment><USER9> I'm struggling to remember the name, but there was a company that sold a TDCS machine marketed as a game performance enhancement device. It only did one montage and was ridiculously unsafe. It used to leave red marks under the sponges on my forehead. Eventually, the app that controlled it aged out of the app store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.natap.org/2019/HIV/s41593.pdf](http://www.natap.org/2019/HIV/s41593.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> full text is available at RG [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332281661_Working_m...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332281661_Working_memory_revived_in_older_adults_by_synchronizing_rhythmic_brain_circuits)

</comment><comment><USER12> Considering the time the treatment takes, I'd be curious to compare the results to 25 minutes a day doing something else which syncs up the brain. Playing an instrument (if physically capable) or meditation.

</comment><comment><USER13> Say wooot?

Since I can't read the paywalled article I'm wondering how exactly do you apply "noninvasive stimulation" on these frequencies. Was it audio, electrodes on a shaved head, combination of drugs, did this work in rats first etc..

<comment><USER14> I don't think we can call electrodes on (in?) a shaved head 'non-invasive'...

<comment><USER15> Well, since I don't consider getting a haircut or shaving to be a surgical procedure, I'd disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Like this? [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581515/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581515/)

<comment><USER17> You have a long list of good comments, so it's worth telling you that you were shadow banned at least 6 months ago... I just vouched for this comment and I have showdead enabled.

<comment><USER18> Yikes, he was shadowbanned in August of 2017 after creating the account in June 2017 and has been commenting into the void ever since!

<comment><USER19> lol! out of curiosity, how can u tell when their account was banned?

<comment><USER20> In your profile, enable showdead. The history goes back a way.

Seeing all those unaddressed, never-seen comments causes me some personal existential self-examining on the value (or rather, potential non-value) of my own thoughts :)

<comment><USER21> So why can I see his comment then? if he's shadowbanned? because you commented?

<comment><USER17> Because I vouched for it</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Easy way to contribute to Haitian Relief - <AUTHOR>

For those using Venmo, text "pay venmocares $X for Unicef Haitian Relief" and they'll donate 100%. <comment><AUTHOR> The link to the original tweet, with the phone number to text to if you're not already using Venmo: <http://twitter.com/VenmoCares/status/7722023481></comment>


Custom Scrollbars in WebKit - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/ <comment><USER2> No, not again. I hoped that the custom scroll bars idea died in 1999...

<comment><USER3> I was reading it thinking the same thing, but the scrollbars on <http://maxvoltar.com/> actually look and work nicely.

<comment><USER4> But completely ignore Fitt's Law. Usually I can speed my mouse to the right of the screen, click, drag. Here I speed to the right of the screen, maybe try clicking and dragging, fail, move in 30 pixels, overshoot, move back and finally can scroll.*

The problem with allowing the customisation of scrollbars is that most people are going to make them worse.

* Personally I use the scroll wheel, but I know a lot of people who don't.

<comment><USER5> I'll bet he could widen the target area while still retaining the original design.

<comment><USER6> To what gain? Custom scrollbars are unnecessary on this page. It makes sense on a scrollable div with lots of content around it; big fat default scrollbars are distracting in that scenario. But this page is a document. It breaks the expectations of the user (what is this thin line on the right of the screen and why can't I see the rest of the document?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its fairly predictable that the reaction to these would be "ugh browsers shouldnt let people do that" but the web is growing up and it is not purely a document delivery platform anymore, there are a lot of cases when a large scrollbar takes up valuable space within a small pane within an applications.

now along the same lines, when are we gonna get clipboard access

</comment><comment><USER8> On regular websites, if done poorly custom scrollbars are not only useless but a major distraction. I like the idea when working on web apps, though. Most native apps take on a custom style (e.g. iTunes), and it's nice to mimic this and give the user a sense of working within a native application. Guess it's just preference though.

<comment><USER9> On Mac OS X, it seems that 99% of apps don't mess with the scrollbars (except for dark HUD-style windows and a other rare special cases where the default look would be too out of place).

iTunes is the lone offender. Those weird flat scrollbars were introduced a couple of years ago -- maybe iTunes 7.0. Perhaps Apple's justification for the change was that they wanted iTunes to look the same on both Mac and Windows.

(Edit -- it worth mentioning that 10.7 Lion will introduce iOS-style scrollbars to the Mac, so we can probably look forward to more freeform scrolling experimentation by app developers as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I often scroll down using space or the pagedown key. This has worked with every webpage I've encountered so far.

While I don't care about the styling, every single linked example on that page doesn't work with space or the pagedown key. I wish there was a bit more polish here...

<comment><USER11> The linked example, <http://maxvoltar.com>, works fine for me for the spacebar and pagedown. I'm using Chrome beta build.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't for me. I have to click on the page first to make them work. OS X 10.6.7 / Safari 5.0.5 here (basically the newest thing you can get from Apple).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ugh, custom scrollbars.

If you're going to do it (but please, don't), do it like this. Not with some crummy Flash applet. I'm talking to you, Vimeo.

</comment><comment><USER13> As long as it merely "skins" the toolbar and doesn't try to override the browser scrolling function, like this terrible, terrible WordPress iPad theme which scrolls through javascript, making it ridiculously jerky and just weird... We're already "skinning" input elements with CSS which by default would look native to the OS, so that makes sense.

The web has grown up since IE5 (where you could merely _color_ the scrollbar) and graphic designers will design some proper ones fitting with the whole site design, while a bad scrollbar design will just be an element of an equally bad site otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was forced (by the client) to use custom scrollbars for a project about a year ago. Ended up using jscrollpane, a jquery plugin. This seems like a better solution.

</comment><comment><USER15> KILL IT!</comment>


Is it a good time to buy a house in San Francisco? - <AUTHOR> http://rbhandari.com/2014/01/19/is-it-a-good-time-to-buy-a-house-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> If you have money to buy a home in San Francisco right now I'm not too worried about your financial future.

<comment><USER3> True, but most people only have credit to buy a home, which is another matter.

<comment><USER4> you'd still need a chunk of change for the downpayment though.

<comment><USER5> you can get an fha loan for 3.5% down for a house up to $625M. If it's a multi-tennant property that can go up to $1.4MM. And to answer your next question, yes you can find housing for those prices in sf. EG I saw a few 800sf 1br and 1200sf 2 br condos about a block and a half from the caltrain station.

There's also a program called 'kiddie condo' that also allows just 3.5% down, but that usually if not always requires a cosigner.

<comment><USER6> Even in SF, you should manage all right with $625 million!

<comment><USER7> In the notation he used: M=1000 and MM=1,000,000, so $625M = $625,000.

I would LOVE it if the financial world got rid of Roman numbers (M=1000) because it's just confusing when Roman and metric units are intermixed.

<comment><USER6> How about we do that, but go back to long scale just to keep things interesting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It depends on your goals. If you plan to live here forever, then you should buy, no question. If you plan to stay for just a few years, the taxes, transaction fees, and closing costs will eat you alive.

Now a better question is if you plan to stay 7 years or more, which is the "normal" amount of time people stay before moving on to a larger home from their starter home. Real Estate markets have about an 8 year cycle, so this fits well for this model of buying.

Also keep in mind are the taxes. In San Francisco, there is a special assessment if you sell a house worth more than 850k or so, and it steps up the more your house sells for (but there is a rebate if you get solar panels, hint hint). California takes 12.7% of your profit, which nearly kiss the $250k/$500k Fed tax exemption for living in a property for 3 out of 5 years.

<comment><USER9> Well said. If one's plan is to stay in SF long term, and they can afford a house they're happy with, they should go for it.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps well said, but presented without evidence or even any attempt at a persuasive argument.

It's not at all clear to me that one should buy a house in SF at this point in time regardless of one's expectations for staying.

It's a crazy market. Do you want to go all-in on up to 500% of your net worth given the market is quite obviously not in equilibrium? The odds are _against_ you getting some great deal here, and there's a very good chance you'll lose several (5-10?) years of accumulated earnings. Leverage goes both ways </rant>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The P-value of the coefficient for the supply of new homes (0.10) is not statistically significant.

There's a high chance that the model is running into a correlation-implies- causation trap, since it's expected for prices to be correlated with macroeconomic interest rates.

<comment><USER12> The model is not statistically sound. An R squared of < 50% implies very little explanation of variance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I bought a home in Berkeley recently. It was not an easy choice. In the end I decided to bet that this accumulation of new tech wealth in the bay area will continue. There will be more IPOs every year with their hundreds or thousands of engineers/etc making solid six figure paydays. And more growth and hiring and big RSU grants from existing tech giants. And more people selling pickaxes to the miners.

I think demand will continue for a long time to come.

<comment><USER14> A lot of the buyers right now, particularly the all-cash-over-asking buyers running up prices, are not necessarily the newly minted tech millionaires. They're newly minted Chinese millionaires. If that market deflates, I think we'd see a significant price correction, or at least a stall-out on the current frenzy in SF housing.

If you buy now, your property probably isn't going to tank (unless it's just ridiculously overvalued for what it is, and some houses in SF certainly fall into that category). SF will be a hot market for a long time to come, thanks to its constrained inventory. But housing might not appreciate significantly over a 5-odd year horizon. Which is fine, fwiw, because one shouldn't be buying housing as an investment in the first place, much less as a short-term investment. Buy income-generating rental properties, with significantly better tax incentives to boot, if that's the goal. Buy a house because you want a place to live. If it happens to appreciate in real terms, and not just in theory, that's gravy. But over the long run, it's unlikely to do so, especially when you factor in all your maintenance, holding, and transaction costs.

<comment><USER15> > A lot of the buyers right now, particularly the all-cash-over-asking buyers > running up prices, are not necessarily the newly minted tech millionaires.

Yes, it's funny that so much of the mainstream discussion around housing in the Bay Area focuses on the wealth created in the tech industry when much of the eye-popping housing activity has actually been driven by foreign buyers.

When it comes to the prices these buyers are willing to pay, it's incredibly important to understand their motivations. Many of these foreign buyers are not buying houses in the United States as "investments" in the traditional sense. Instead, they are using houses as stores of wealth because they are acutely aware that their capital/assets are at risk in their home countries. In other words, a house in San Francisco may be more secure than a bank vault in, say, China, as far as wealth preservation is concerned.

American buyers competing for assets that have appreciated rapidly in value in recent years due to foreign demand, and who may be far more sensitive to the potential for gain or loss, should at least understand this.

<comment><USER16> > In other words, a house in San Francisco may be more secure than a bank > vault in, say, China, as far as wealth preservation is concerned.

But wouldn't a bank vault in America be an even better choice than a house in SF? Why aren't these wealthy Chinese people making more liquid investments once they've moved their money abroad?

<comment><USER15> There are a lot of factors. I'll point out two:

1\. Negative real interest rates.

2\. It's easier to protect your identity/privacy. Notably, real estate agents and title insurers are exempt from having to file Suspicious Activity Reports with the Treasury Department.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure about #2.

When you buy a home the information on the title is public knowledge. Sure, you could create a holding corporation, but the officers of a company are also public information.

Also, real estate agents and title insurers don't handle cash at all. If you buy a house from me in cash, I'll kindly ask you to deposit it and send me a check. When the buyer goes to a bank with cash or other suspicious sources of money, the banks will fill out a SAR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Like most models this assumes there are no black swans. If housing follows tech valuations in bay area then this question is just another way of asking are we living in tech bubble? If bubble is going to burst then hot market will suddenly become very cold.

Looking at valuations of things like Whatsapp or even AirBnB or Dropbox for that matter, I personally think we are living in giant bubble. The profit has little meaning in tech now, revenue projections are extremely optimistic and on the top of that there is huge factors applied on to it to arrive at valuations. This causes funny implications like Dropbox can buy entire chain of Cheesecake Factory with over 150 stores and still have 3/4 of its valuation intact. This would be despite of the fact that all prospective buyers have developed effective competitive products and are giving it away for free.

<comment><USER19> Another poster was downvoted but raised a very valid point: what about the "big one", the earthquake that's supposed to hit SF sometime in this decade or the next? That's one big Black Swan.

[http://www.sanandreasfault.org/BigOne.html](http://www.sanandreasfault.org/BigOne.html)

I guess insurance can be depended upon to offset that particular risk? (do try to insure with a company that reinsures somewhere that won't go broke in the event of said earthquake).

Other post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882603)

<comment><USER20> It's nearly impossible to buy earthquake insurance (affordably) in the Bay Area, because all the big insurance companies know that it's going to happen and aren't willing to expose themselves to a potentially company-destroying event. Policies are available, but the cost of insuring against them is nearly as much as insuring against everything else that your homeowner's policy covers.

Most Bay Area homeowners are depending on a combination of prayer and federal disaster-relief funds, figuring that the government will bail them out if an Act of God destroys San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Summary: No. "Buying now will not yield to you a big upside in 5 years."

<comment><USER22> For most people, houses are machines for living in and not "investments". Given large up-front costs, you will almost always be in the hole for some amount of time after you purchase, but depending on what you buy and the alternative it can substantially lower your ongoing costs. Little of this has to do with year-to-year fluctuations in the housing market.

Of course, in SF, buying usually raises your ongoing costs. So...

<comment><USER23> Agreed. Buy for utility rather than as an investment. If you end up making money selling the house at some point in the future net transaction costs I'd consider it a bonus.

That said, IMO buying a house with the goal of selling it in a 2-5 years is foolish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are there companies in the US that will buy a house you pick and rent it to you?

<comment><USER25> Not so much for single family detached houses, but built-to-rent apartment buildings are becoming a fairly popular investment class. Real estate has generally used different capital structures for tax reasons (REITs) and to access the artificially subsidized by the federal government individual mortgage market, but there are now funds which buy distressed or underpriced real estate and convert it en masse into rentals, and companies building various kinds of multifamily dwellings-to-let.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No:

\- supposedly there's going to be a big earthquake in the area: [http://www.earthquakesafety.com/earthquake- faults.html](http://www.earthquakesafety.com/earthquake-faults.html)

\- other places have been trending on HN recently, Los Angeles, even Berlin ([https://medium.com/wandering-cto/my-journey-into-the- berlin-...](https://medium.com/wandering-cto/my-journey-into-the-berlin- startup-scene-4dc8faecd305)), suggesting hot things going to happen elsewhere in the future?

Last point is wild speculation of course: Peak Silicon Valley? The earthquake though...

</comment><comment><USER27> The OP forgot about inflation and its effects on the model. It will probably have a much more profound effect that number of housing starts.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it _ever_ a good time to buy a house in San Francisco? It's cheaper to buy a house in Sacramento instead and pay for the gas and/or transit fares required to commute.

<comment><USER29> That's a 90 minute commute by car, which is not very practical for most people. However, it is usually a better idea to buy a house across the Bay, where it is significantly cheaper, and commute the 15-30 minutes to work in SF or wherever every day.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ieddit – A minimalist, Reddit-like site with anonymous posts/comments - cc-d https://ieddit.com/about/ <comment><AUTHOR> I had an idea for a minimal change to improve a Reddit-like site, perhaps you will find it interesting: split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".

Tags: much of the content of Reddit is people reposting the same thing at various times to various subreddits, and many of the comments are people noticing that it fits into "r/whatever" instead. The default behavior should be that posts of the same link to various tags (r/awww, r/catsstandingup) should not recreate a new post but just backlink to the same post. Repeat posts to the same tag should be a no-operation. This removes the community aspect of tags, and some of the worst emergent behaviors of reddit along with it. Treating a tag as both a topic and a community leads to a neverending cycle of people creating niche topic tags for the community aspect, but then finding themselves "invaded" as people will always want to find and comment on content about topics that they disagree with.

But of course the community aspect of Reddit leads to good things. So you make a separate concept of communities. These communities could follow the posts of one or more tags, applying filters to those of their own choosing, and make their discussion visible within community borders only or visible to all, based on their own choices (in addition to internal community posts.) They can control admission to the communities on their own rules (fully public, invite codes only, etc.) The ability to automatically follow the posts of certain tags (and either view or not view public comments) will keep small communities from getting stale for lack of posts.

<comment><USER2> > split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".

Tags are brilliant idea until you have tens of thousands of them. Plural forms, hyphens or without hyphens, synonyms, i18n tags of the same thing, mis- spellings, etc.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see some 'AI' assisted tagging, where users are prompted to use a tag from a pool of common tags with the AI making suggestions on what might be appropriate, this would address most of the issues listed above.

<comment><USER4> Something like Stack Exchange's tag system would be enough.

<comment><USER3> I'm not massively familiar with Stack Exchanges tag system, it does have some synonym handling, [https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms](https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms) , that seems limited to one alternative though, is there a more advanced aspect that I am missing, perhaps covering sememes?

<comment><USER5> Can sort by Target to see the (sometimes) multiple synonyms for a particular tag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How will you avoid-

> John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was proposed in the Penny > Arcade (web comic) on March 19, 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. It > says that when a normal person is allowed anonymity and an audience, they > lose social inhibitions and act inappropriately.

If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law. Usernames and comment history seem to help somewhat with people acting accountable for their actions. Total anonymity seems to always lead to a cesspool like 4chan.

<comment><USER7> Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links.

I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websites. Sure there was always a war against spammers and scripts, but I feel like you could find more independent content from individuals instead of these big link aggregation platforms (remember web-rings?)

There is more to think about today when making something that hosts other's content (or links to that content). I'm surprised ActivityPub networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) haven't had more issues with spam and bad actors.

When starting a project like this, I think a few small things authors should consider right off the bat: implement some Captcha (preferably an open source implementation that's not Google mandated tracking, if you can find something decent), for at least account creation .. maybe posts too. I'm not sure what Lobsters uses for spam testing/filtering, but it'd be worth looking at that and other projects for any quick solutions. Prismo ([https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo](https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo)) also comes to mind.

<comment><USER8> Most Masto/Pleroma instances are too small to be worth the trouble. I get about 1-2 spam bots signing up per week, usually deleted automatically or within 1 hour of signing up (longer if all the admins are sleeping).

Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly.

With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them.

Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good luck with moderating this thing. Everyone bitches and moans about Reddit, but the fact of the matter is that sites like Reddit cost a ton to keep up and running and without some sort of revenue, they go down. Without some sort of regulation, sites QUICKLY divulge into a collection of scrupulous and illegal activities, and become blacklisted from advertisers.

I get how everyone wants a community that they can posts and share things anonymously, but the fact of the matter is that unless you have unlimited money where you can fight legal battles and absorb the cost of running it yourself, at some point you are going to need outside resources to keep the thing online and that comes in forms of donations or advertising.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if there's some way to do it in a decentralised way? But that'd be susceptible to 51%-esque attacks too, and no one wants to provide resources for the site.

I think we're gonna be stuck with shitty walled censored communities for a while. At least there's hn?

<comment><USER9> "I wonder if there's some way to do it in a decentralized way" \- Everyone has that same thought until it's put into practice and you find yourself hosting stuff "from the community" that can get you dragged into court or prison. BTW... if you think "the community" is going to come together and help you through the financial and legal hardships you will be sorely mistaken. They will just pack up and move on to the next thing and you will be let to fend for yourself.

<comment><USER11> Maybe this is an opportunity to use machine learning to filter this stuff out? It could be done on the client side for every user connecting to the network. That way each user would have control over what comes into their machine, rather than just being an open dropbox. You could also force everything to be plaintext and just block anything encrypted or in an unrecognized file format.

<comment><USER9> You do that and let us know how that works out for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this "reddit-with-4chan-features" approach is more viable than 8chan's "4chan-with-reddit-features" approach, since I don't think the imageboard model is very compatible with the "community-run boards" feature. It's also a good thing that (it appears that) this website is "fresh" and apolitical rather than coming forth from a political rift in another community (e.g. 8chan, gab, voat).

I'll definitely be following this website with interest; I'm a huge fan of sites that allow anonymous posting as well as how Reddit can create active communities around very niche topics (which is a lot harder on e.g. 4chan).

EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.

EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")

<comment> cc-d >EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.

Loli/shota porn mainly. Other forms of borderline cp. The problem is, specifically stating 'hey don't upload THIS CONTENT', will result in people specifically uploading that content to buck the rules. I'll probably still add the clarification.

The gray area clause allows operational leeway.

>EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")

I see a lot of people suggesting this. tbh I kind of like teh association with the "leddit" term, I find it amusing. From a ui perspective, the /i/ might make more sense though.

<comment><USER12> >Loli/shota porn mainly Consider my interest in the site nullified and your morals ridiculed.

<comment><USER13> Porn is 3d pretty sure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For a site focused on transparency and privacy, it's parked behind CloudFlare. I can't view the site past the about page without JS enabled and allowing CloudFlare to probe and track me.

> Decentralized platforms are not an ideal solution for

> internet communities.

Hard disagree. Communities are about give and take, the early internet was driven by people hosting bulletin boards, IRC servers, web servers, etc. There are people out there still willing to be part of the solution if you give them the chance.

> TOR is also not an answer, the technical barrier in

> accessing hidden services alone disqualifies them as a

> practical alternative, before even considering the

> bandwidth/latency limitations.

TOR is plug-and-play these days, although using TOR effectively requires a change in mind-set, both for the server owners and users of such servers.

> As seen with youtube, reddit, &c. With transparency and

> accountability, and without a significant profit incentive

> to do otherwise, the model still works.

Servers, time and expertise usually cost money. Staff running the show need to put food on their tables one way or another - there will always be a financial incentive. Unless, of course, you reduce running costs to near zero.

<comment> cc-d >For a site focused on transparency and privacy, it's parked behind CloudFlare. I can't view the site past the about page without JS enabled and allowing CloudFlare to probe and track me.

Unfortunately I have no choice in this regard. I do no have the means to resist any sort of ddos. I remember at one point you could set the 'cloudflare security level' to low, but when I looked in the UI today I could not find such an option.

If there exists a solution to either not using cloudflare, or some option hidden away that allows me to tell clouflare o fuck off with how it treats traffic, I'd love to know.

<comment><USER14> > If there exists a solution to either not using cloudflare,

> or some option hidden away that allows me to tell clouflare

> o fuck off with how it treats traffic, I'd love to know.

The method I use to avoid CloudFlare altogether (probably wrong as it's bespoke) is to do the following before "handling" the request:

* Store all connecting IPs, last request time and the rate at which requests are being made in a serviced-buffer. If the request rate becomes too high, give them a timeout (return a very small page telling them to come back in a few minutes).

* If database hits are high, drop non-important requests first, starting with views, then up/down votes, comments and then user security. Views and votes can fail silently and most people won't be any of the wiser.

* If static content requests are high, drop generated content first, followed by large files (all JS, most CSS, images, etc). For the generated content, you can use a recently generic cached view.

* Lastly, if all else fails, just return a redirect to some static server hosted somewhere strong (like GitHub pages for example), explaining that demand is high at this current time.

This approach has worked for me so far. Under high load, you need to handle requests as soon as possible, even if it means not returning something. Holding onto a connection is what will sink your ship.

In general most sites seem to die because they spend too long dealing with individual requests. especially when the database is hit. As soon as you overload a WordPress database for example, it's screwed. And this is just for displaying content to the website!

<comment><USER13> Do you even need to store ips? Just count accepted connections and every, say, 1000th connection check current time, if less than a second elapsed since previous check, close the listening socket. Isn't ddos caused by packet congestion rather than server processing?

<comment><USER14> > Just count accepted connections and every, say, 1000th

> connection check current time, if less than a second

> elapsed since previous check, close the listening socket.

Then you risk killing genuine traffic. Above average hit from a handful of locations is more likely to be abuse.

> Isn't ddos caused by packet congestion rather than server

> processing?

From what I understand, a DDoS attack any pat of your system, usually the part that is the slowest. You want to kill attacking traffic as quickly as possible without affecting genuine traffic. As for attacks on the network itself, this is where you rely on your cloud service provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am of the opinion this should represent subs as /i/all, instead of with /r/

<comment><USER16> yep, should use /i/ for subs instead of /r/ because the latter is, most of the time, associated with reddit.

<comment> cc-d from a ui perspective, i think this is correct.

the only issue will be losing familiarity for reddit users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cc-d yes hello site's creator here

there were a ton of technical issues earlier that are now 'mostly' fixed

in terms of the nsfw content, the index page is basically /r/all without nsfw. marking something as nsfw in a sfw sub hides the thumbnail.

this was posted here while i was sleeping... i went to bed thinking nobody had noticed my previous post and wasn't being attentive. the original post i made to Show Hn was 15 hours ago... I'm guessing a mod 'refreshed' this?

<comment><USER17> >yes hello site's creator here

I like your way of greeting

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Anonymous /r/beastiality 6h

> Dogs knotting women (www.com)

Really, who expected anything else?

<comment><USER19> ...and there is no /r/bestiality. Come on, people...if you are going to make a forum for your interests, at least learn to spell the name of those interests. The word comes from the Latin word _bestia_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The name 'ieddit' is way too close to 'reddit' and should be changed to avoid trademark issues.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like the idea of having a website like reddit, similar functionality without the bloat.

The new reddit design is horrible.

The design on the site could be a little closer to this site perhaps.

<comment><USER22> [https://old.reddit.com/](https://old.reddit.com/)

This is how I still browse the site. You can also disable subreddit theming in your preferences and you've got a much more lite version of the site like the old days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Based upon the first few posts, this probably isn't a great idea.

<comment> cc-d This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.

The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would be willing to pay up to 10 usd per month to be able to create an account and run my news feed under my domain name.

</comment><comment><USER25> Three clicks in and I see a picture of a dog fucking a woman.

<comment> cc-d This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.

The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://github.com/cc-d/ieddit](https://github.com/cc-d/ieddit)

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually think these are compelling features:

* Fully Transparent Mod/Admin Action Logs <\- This is evidenced by the fact that on reddit mod drama sparks up every so often

* Anonymous Posting Option <\- The fact that people make throwaways indicates that they desire anonymity sometimes

My next question though is what stops reddit from implementing them?

<comment><USER28> > My next question though is what stops reddit from implementing them?

They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.

<comment><USER29> > They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let > users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's > required.

As far as I know, it's still not required. When you're at the signup popup and it's asking for your email, just click next. It's not a required field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea of anonymous posting and at the same time on Reddit I've found challenges with brand new accounts with agendas showing up en mass with little regard for the local community and just wanting to push their agenda.

It's a rough thing to allow anonymous comments and also foster a community online.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice work! I really like the UI and the concept.

I got excited by your post because I'm building a reddit-clone too.

It's called Dinomia and it's a just-for-fun concept with a transaction system.

Each time you upvote something an "upvote / credit" is transferred from you to the author of the post, like sending money. When you create a post/comment/community you loose X "upvote/credits" etc.

I hope Ieddit has great success and congratulations again for the work you have done.

</comment><comment><USER32> Looking at the code base, it doesn't look like there's any CSRF protection in place. Not sure what other security issues there are but I'd be careful about using this. You probably want some tests in there as well. Overall looks like a promising project but you might have rushed to get something in front of people when a bit more polish would have made a better first impression.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sorry, but I can't register as my perfectly reasonable name (although, quite long, but < 30 ASCII characters) declined as invalid.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like mastodon's way of marking "sensitive" content, which will hide text or pictures until you explicitly click to open them.

</comment><comment><USER35> Total anonymity is the fastest way to get law enforcement on your back IME, unless you enjoy spending your day dealing with takedowns.

</comment><comment><USER36> Really nice, I appreciate that you don't use Google's ReCaptcha. Some suggestions if you're targeting privacy, remove third party assets and remove all JavaScript and add a Tor hidden service. People who are obsessed with privacy will run NoScript a lot of time.

<comment><USER37> Agreed. NoCaptcha is a red falg to me as a user that usability has taken a backseat to ease of administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Are emails visible to others users? (nice to know before u fill it out for possible password recovery)

</comment><comment><USER39> Almost every single action signs me out. Creating a sub gives back an 'invalid' error message', which then signs me out.

Have clicked on less than 10 links and have already been exposed to bestiality images. This post in question has been up for half an hour, where is the moderation?

<comment> cc-d I am the only 'moderator' and I was asleep whenever this was re-submitted without me having any fore-warning.

The technical errors are fixed now. I went to bed with the site reconfigured, not worrying too much because I thought this post was a dud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How do you avoid becoming like other Rediit clones like Notabug [http://notabug.io/](http://notabug.io/) where you get toxic posts and comments? You give people anonymous access and they show their dark sides.

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks like this is getting a lot of HN hug of death.

Let the username landgrab begin. Apparently they are called SubEddits instead of Subreddits? Not much in the way of r/android or similar but time will tell if this lasts or vanishes. Seems nice enough so far.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why not use an existing (well-tested) code base like Postmill [https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill](https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill) ?

</comment><comment><USER43> How are you going to prevent your reddit clone website being overrun with lowest-common-denominator content? i.e. how you will maintain quality long- term, after the initial rush of novelty wears off.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm getting the error:

> Too Many Requests: 60 per 1 minute

I visited the site twice...

It looks interesting, but I am curious what are the implications. I.e. how does everyone's interactions change.

Also seems kinda weird I have to login to be honest...

<comment> cc-d This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.

The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There's something weird when I create a post. When I search existing subs, (for example programming) it doesn't seem to work.

Am I doing something wrong or is it a bug?

<comment> cc-d Bug. Fixed now, 4 minute response time :)

<comment><USER45> Waouh congrats!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Have you thought about making the data distributed and p2p? that way it's more resilient. Reddit at one stage was also minimalist and open source

<comment><USER47> Why don't we just bring back Usenet?

<comment><USER48> To be fair Reddit was basically Usenet in web form for the longest of time. Then they needed to make money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Patreon's URL for reporting community guidelines violations is here:

[https://support.patreon.com/hc/en- us/requests/new](https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/requests/new)

Those guidelines are here for anyone who is curious:

[https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines](https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines)

<comment><USER37> How is this relevant? The project does not seem to be violating any guidelines. Are you suggesting an illegal and unethical reporting of a sites donated income because you don't agree with it on a publicly indexed forum? If so, thats really messed up.

<comment><USER49> "Illegal"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The name is very similar to lemmy with this font. Lemmy being the federated alternative to Reddit/HN: [https://dev.lemmy.ml](https://dev.lemmy.ml)

</comment><comment><USER51> How do you make sure that anonymity is not abused?

<comment><USER52> how do you make sure that identity is not abused?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Now if only Ieddit, Tildes, Lobsters, Hacker News, Voat, and NotABug would all federate with each other like Lemmy[1] and Prismo[2].

[1]: [https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy](https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy) [2]: [https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo](https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo)

</comment><comment><USER54> I read as "Leddit"

<comment><USER55> Great name for a Zeppelin sub!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nice

</comment><comment><USER57> comments links are not working.

</comment><comment><USER58> For chan

</comment><comment><USER59> ieddit sounds quite close to idiot. You might want to change that (unless it was intended)

</comment><comment><USER60> Is the site dead already?

</comment><comment><USER61> Hasn't the past 20 years shown that anonymous posts and comments are a perfect breeding ground for trolls?

<comment><USER62> You're on a site where at least half the commenters are anonymous, and evidently the discussion level here is good enough for you to stay. Conversely, Facebook is not any less cancerous because they have a real name policy. So no, I'd say the least N years have not shown that.

<comment><USER63> I think the most important aspect of a community is its members. Reddit, Facebook, etc have all tried hard to grow their communities and have reduced the quality of them as they increased the headcount.

The best communities don't strive for the hockey stick growth.

<comment><USER64> Reddit and Facebook are not a single community, they are many communities some of which have a very high bar for quality, and some of which are a free for all that tends toward low quality memes and trolling.

<comment><USER65> I found that removing any community of more than 100K subscribers from my reddit experience made it much more tolerable.

In the old design you could go to /r/ _subredditname_ /comments and see an ordered list of comments regardless of which post they were associated with. It really livened things up and let you track the conversations going on given that there wern't that many new posts in a given day. That's gone with the new design unfortunately.

<comment><USER66> You can opt out of the new design and still access that.

Example: [https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/](https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/)

I have disabled the new design entirely in my user preferences, so I get the old design even if I don't put "old" in the URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I haven't used Reddit in a very long time, but does it not allow anonymous posts and comments any more? My account, at least, isn't tied to my real name or identity in any way, IIRC.

Anyway, I'm not sure anonymity is a great feature. The lack of accountability is a good part of the reason why Reddit became such a cesspool.

<comment><USER68> You're mixing up anonymity and pseudonymity.

<comment><USER47> Just create a new throwaway account each time.

<comment><USER69> This used to be a lot easier. Now reddit doesn't let you create an account without an email (and most burner email tools are blocked like [https://www.mailinator.com/](https://www.mailinator.com/).

<comment><USER47> Actually it does. Just hit "next" when it prompts for an email. I just created another account 30 seconds ago, no email required.

<comment><USER70> My comments often don't show up when I don't verify an email address, which severely limits the use of anonymous accounts.

<comment><USER17> To me it seems like there are features of the site or certain subs that essentially shitlist you until your account is of a certain age or upvote quota. You're not wrong that posts by brand new accounts seem to be invisible sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Would be nice to have it written in Go, to be truly minimalist and for easy local deployment.</comment>


Do Fathers Who Exercise Have Smarter Babies? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/well/move/do-fathers-who-exercise-have-smarter-babies.html <comment><USER2> The title makes it sound like a dull statistical correlation was found in some sociology report, but they did some actual measuring. From the report summary:

> We show that this effect is mediated through sperm RNA and especially miRs > 212/132\. In conclusion, our study reports intergenerational inheritance of > an acquired cognitive benefit and points to specific miRs as candidates > mechanistically involved in this type of transmission.

[https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(18)304...](https://www.cell.com/cell- reports/fulltext/S2211-1247\(18\)30404-2?sf186956567=1)

<comment><USER3> In mice, though. It's an open question to what extent rodent results apply to humans. This result should open doors to future research, but by itself should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt.

<comment><USER4> It's a well known fact that mice and humans promdominantly share the same genome, so this research should be taken with more than grain of salt, methinks.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that also true of me and corn?

<comment><USER6> ~85% with mice, ~60% with bananas. I suspect corn is more like a banana than a mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone else notice that there's been an increasing number of mildly successful research that hint towards Lamarckian evolution as being real sometimes?

Has something changed (either ease or impetus) that's made it easy to do such research?

Or does it have something to do with the fact that most people's conception of evolution is Lamarckian in nature?

Whenever I ask someone to describe evolution, they describe it the way Lamarck thought it worked. And when I talk about natural selection, they say they need time to digest that.

<comment><USER8> The way I conceptualize of it is that evolution is still almost entirely Darwinian, but that there's also a ton of other stuff that happens. Without wanting to get political, I think a good analogy would be human gender and sexuality. The statement that there are two human sexes, male and female, and that they seek each other out for the purpose of mating explains somewhere around 95% of what you see in humans. But human sexuality is complicated and to get to an explanation that encompasses 100% of what you observe requires vastly expanding your model of what's going on. So what's going on now with evolution is that we are discovering all the little ways in which evolution is complicated.

<comment><USER9> A slight mismatch in your analogy is that G&S studies doesn't explain anything, they just categorize it. They aren't proposing any mechanisms.

<comment><USER8> There is definitely serious research into the causal mechanisms of homosexuality and transgenderism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So that would imply that people who actually must exercise for their job (construction workers) would have smarter children, on average? And how would that be measured if the child gets stuck in a poorly performing school and no real academic challenges?

<comment><USER11> Exercise for work and exercise done for play may have different outcomes though. I remember reading George Sheehan's Running and Being and he says dockworkers etc don't seem to get the same health benefits from their work exercise. There's something unique about it being for play.

<comment><USER12> Importantly, mice are exercised by being forced to run in wheels, i.e., cardio.

There have been studios _in humans_ showing that cardio exercise has mental benefits, presumably in part due to increased blood flow to the brain. And anecdotally, among knowledge workers like lawyers and doctors, cardio exercise is disproportionately over-represented compared to average populations.

<comment><USER13> The last bit is interesting. But ya have to wonder which came first...the runner or the knowledge worker. Know what I mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> " mice whose fathers grew in environmentally enriched cage have better LTP". That's basically what the study says, and they attribute it to epigenetic effects through some miRNA. The effect lasted for 1 generation.

How can someone take that, put an image of a human baby and start talking about "smart babies" and "fathers who exercise" is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER15> Could a correlation factor be:

Fathers that exercise have more active children?

Meaning, less to do with sperm and more to do with the development of and interaction with the infant?

If I am a sloth, my child is likely sitting in a cradle watching TV with me.

</comment><comment><USER13> The lack of exercise is a historical abnormality. In that context, which feels more accurate, the title should be: "Do fathers who don't exercise have less intelligent children?"

</comment><comment><USER16> Makes me wonder how sperm motility correlates with offspring IQ.

And could an improved selection for higher sperm motility (e.g. by giving sperm some extra challenge before they reach the ovum), lead to higher IQ or some other beneficial trait?

<comment><USER17> Interesting thought, could also lead to lower fertility is the other side of the coin there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "They also hope in future animal studies to tease out the individual effects of running from those of playing with toys and being otherwise mentally engaged, he says."

How can they not have done this yet still draw the conclusion that the exercise was the important factor?

I wouldn't be surprised if the "sedentary" individuals would have been diagnosed with depression, had they beem humans. What would make an interesting study is epigenetic effects of depression on human patients.

</comment><comment><USER19> They should also test fathers/kids who put vinegar on their pizza...

</comment><comment><USER20> Smarter in which area and would be be at expense of other traits?

</comment><comment><USER21> Do smarter babies know how to make daddy hit the gym??

</comment><comment><USER22> Actual title: "Do Fathers Who Exercise Have Smarter Babies?"

To further quote the article: "My personal opinion is that exercise is probably much more important" than mental stimulation for altering brains and gene expression and potentially even the aptitudes of one's offspring, Dr. Fischer says.

If the author of the article specifically phrased it as a question, let's not jump to making a definitive statement by changing the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used the title from the NY Times homepage, which at the time of submission had the more definitive version of the title.

<comment><USER23> We'll update the headline to the current title, then, which is also in the URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish HN would ban all betteridge's style headlines.

How much did newton or einstein's father exercise? Were they body builders?

<comment><USER25> >How much did newton or einstein's father exercise? Were they body builders?

Why would that matter? Are they the only smart people? And why are you conflating exercising with body building?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Most people don't exercise because no one is paying them to exercise. If a government wants healthy people, they should pay up $100 per hour to just exercise.

I think this is the conspiracy of rich people to make poor people fat so that they get sick and rich people sell medicines, fast food, and garcinia combogia, gym membership (which is just another name for drugs like cocaine, meth etc.... but licensed and regulated)

<comment><USER27> _Not_ paying people to take care of themselves is a conspiracy? Is paying people to take care of themselves, somehow the natural state of the world?

<comment><USER26> Assuming that everyone knows how to take care of themselves is ignorance.

We don't live in a natural state, otherwise, it would have been fine for me to kill you for my survival.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> .

<comment><USER29> The study described (albeit in mice) eliminates that confounding variable.

<comment><USER30> Maybe the researchers only allowed the rich mice to move to the "fun house" cage

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How do you even define smart? Is it quantified by the IQ tests? Does smartness include the factor of social skills(EQ) and how someone may present himself or herself in a social situations. How do you decide what's smart and what's not smart?

<comment><USER32> Why do social skills have any preferred treatment over any other skills? I'd say smart is best measured by IQ.

<comment><USER31> What do you exactly measure by comparing IQs? A person who does not do well on math test can become much more "successful" than a person who does. How does IQ really correlate with success?

<comment><USER32> It correlates a lot, actually. It even may be one of the best predictors (if not the best, I dunno honestly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Correlation implied as causation.

Here is another correlation into causation article linking cardiovascular fitness to IQ[0]

Another way to look at it can be from the per-capita relation of economic class to fitness[1]. It is entirely possible that, because people higher up the economic ladder are more likely to be fit, and because they are more likely to receive better prenatal care, generally have better nutrition, and give their children more educational opportunities, that the actual cause may be economic status.

[0] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted- science/2009...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/quilted- science/200912/cardiovascular-fitness-is-linked-intelligence)

[1] [https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/10/the- correla...](https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/10/the-correlation- of-fitness-with-class-and-education/)

<comment><USER34> This article is about a study done on mice. Having not read the underlying study, and it not being my field, I can't speak to how well the article articulates the study's findings, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss it with the "correlation does not imply causation" argument.

<comment><USER33> > on mice

And the article automatically relates it to humans, when absolutely no study has been done. Correlation to causation.

<comment><USER25> >And the article automatically relates it to humans,

From the article:

"Of course, this study involved mice and not men and cannot tell us whether the same processes occur in people."

> when absolutely no study has been done. Correlation to causation.

It is unethical to run certain studies on humans, which is why the mice models are used (also pigs, fish, flies, worms, etc) initially. And such models have been fantastically successful. It seems like you are rather unfamiliar with the scientific process...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Site/service connecting startup concepts w/ hackers for co-founding? - <AUTHOR>

I might have phrased that wrong, but might programmers/hackers who have no current ideas be interested with helping bootstrap another concept?  Or is that too craigslist?
A previous question posed here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1433729) got me wondering.  I'm interested as well. <comment><USER2> I coded up an app for this a few of months ago - <http://findmycofounder.com>

<comment><USER3> Gnarly! Have you put much effort into publicizing the app yet? I had not heard of it until now, but think you've got something very nice there. Hope it gets plenty of attention, as this kind of thing sorta needs the "network effect" to be truly useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.techcofounder.com/></comment>


Fix The Sandbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/2324/fix-the-sandbox

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant comment by Brent Simmons:

      I toss all my Mac app ideas that require more than the default sandboxing rules — no matter how cool the idea is.

      The sandbox has a chilling effect on at least one developer. I'd be surprised if it were just me.

[http://inessential.com/2012/02/17/daniel_on_fixing_the_sandb...](http://inessential.com/2012/02/17/daniel_on_fixing_the_sandbox)</comment>


Twilio announces $130M series E round - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/07/announcing-twilio-series-e-funding.html

<comment><USER2> Several years ago, they would just IPO. They seems to be in a great shape to do that:

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/07/twilio- raises-a-70m-series-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/07/twilio- raises-a-70m-series-d-as-they-consider-an-ipo/)

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/02/20/twilio- positi...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/02/20/twilio-positions- itself-for-an-ipo-after-logging-100m-in-2014-revenue/)

Yet another case of late stage private capital.

<comment><USER3> The tech crunch article has some good details, and no, I don't think they would be able to successfully IPO just yet, the reason is in the Tech Crunch article :

 _" In February of this year, Twilio noted that it was adding $1 million in recurring revenue every seven days, having ended 2014 with a revenue run rate of $100 million. But like many quickly growing cloud startups, Twilio loses money.

In the first half of 2015, the company booked $71.74 million in sales, with cost of revenue of $32.32 million. Those figures leave a gross profit of $39.42 million for the period. Deducting operating expenses and other costs, Twilio had a net loss of $16.370 million in the first six months of 2015."_

So the first half of the year was $71M in sales, and they are running at an operating loss.

They are adding $1M in recurring revenue a week. And we know that it costs them roughly $450K to in costs to service that revenue (cost of revenue).

If we add in $1M in recurring revenue a week, for 6 months that is and additional $26M in revenue, maybe $14.3M in additional income (subtracted off the $450K/million cost of revenue), their 'burn rate' or costs for the first half were 39M + 16M or $55M (that is $39M in gross margin and a $16M net loss), if they keep costs constant (don't add head count, same level of capital investment they had in the first half, etc) then we can guess that their costs for the full year would be about $110M, subtracted from their gross revenue (after paying cost of revenue) of $88M they end up losing about $22M for the year.

You have a hard time IPO'ing if your business isn't paying for itself. And if it isn't paying for itself, you can't IPO if you can't clearly explain why it eventually _will_ be paying for itself.

So the multi-million dollar question which the CEO is no doubt mulling over, is that given the cost of revenue, and the company's costs to get that revenue, is there a point where they make money? In my napkin analysis I made a very charitable assumption that their additional revenue won't incur any additional costs, but that may be incorrect. They may (or may not) write off their equipment against revenue which is not unusual in accrual based accounting but their corp infrastructure and things like leased space come out of G&A. So either they have a story of how they reduce their costs to make money on existing revenue, or they have a story that new revenue adds more gross margin than costs it consumes, and plot an intercept path to operationally cash flow positive and then net cash flow positive. At THAT point they can IPO and stop thinking like a startup.

<comment><USER4> Is "cost of revenue" typically inclusive of recurring revenue? Or just new revenue (ie. cost of sales)?

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer, I'm not an accountant, but I've been audited by one :-). In web services company its cost of providing the services, so for example a $6,000 a month bill for IP transit services to Cogent or Level 1 would be a 'cost of revenue' and depreciation of the servers, or telephone access fees. Anything which has a monthly recurring cost, and is providing the infrastructure to deliver the service. It is an analog to the cost of goods sold.

And sorry I didn't answer the basic question.

Recurring revenue would be revenue that you get every month, like subscription revenue, memberships etc. Cost of revenue would be expenses you pay every month. Over the month you accrue revenue and you accrue costs associated with providing that revenue, you subtract the costs from the revenue to get the gross margin on that revenue. Example if you pay 100/month to run an EC2 instance and that EC2 instance is providing a service to 300 subscribers paying $1 a month, then your recurring revenue is 300 a month, your cost of revenue is 100 a month, your gross margin is (300 - 100) / 300 or 66%.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for clarifying on the terminology. I work at a SaaS company so am familiar with the dynamics, but less so on the financial terminology side of things ;)

So basically, based on your estimates, they are still running negative despite that recurring revenue, and with their current COGS, there may not be an intercept point yet where they are profitable with current figures even as that recurring revenue continues to grow?

<comment><USER3> Correct, the question, which we can't answer with available data, is what is the "marginal margin" or more clearly for each million dollars of increased revenue does the cost of revenue stay the same? Or go down? If it stays the same, and their over heads don't go down, then they need basically another year and a half of growth at their current rate to break even. On the outside looking in we can't know of course, somewhere though, there is a spreadsheet :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to see that Bessemer Venture Partners isn't listed as participating in this round. They've been involved in all the previous funding.

<comment><USER6> Rob from Twilio here - the firms listed in the first two paragraphs are the new folks who are joining in this round, not the exclusive list of all participants.

BVP did participate in this round - great team to work with.

[edit] typo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many rounds of funding can a startup have? For example, has any company ever reached H round?

<comment><USER8> Twitter has had a series G round: [https://www.crunchbase.com/funding- round/6e6bf5db8245ac7b960...](https://www.crunchbase.com/funding- round/6e6bf5db8245ac7b96059e4e0b99e08a)

<comment><USER9> Supposedly, Palantir's latest is a Series I: [http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/06/24/report-cia-backed- bi...](http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/06/24/report-cia-backed-big-data- analytics-firm-palantir-raising-500m-series-i-on-20b-valuation/)

And Alien Technology raised a Series L: [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/09/alien-technology- rfid...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/09/alien-technology-rfid- specialist-lands-series-l-funding/)

<comment><USER10> >Alien is not setting a record for venture fundings. VentureSource counts four U.S. companies since 1992 that had raised 13 equity rounds through the second quarter of this year.

So at least 4 series M, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do early-round investors bank off of later ones? I don't really know anything about fundraising, so my perception is that money it just getting shifted around from one investor to the next.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes a small portion of a round is used to buy out previous investors or sell some founder/early employee shares, but that's not the point of a round like this. If it's not for growth of the company, that would be a bad sign.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes it's a much larger portion. For example, when Twitter raised its last pre-IPO round of $800 million, half of that immediately went to cash out early employees and investors. FB also did this when DST invested. Most venture funds aren't set up for the current timeline to liquidity (I'm sure to VC's chagrin).

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119035202045764823...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903520204576482351255849460)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Let's hope they use this to stabilize their systems and make it more reliable. Have been extensively using their service, and there are times when the SMS doesn't get delivered.

<comment><USER15> I had the same issues. Ran a side by side analysis with Nexmo and Nexmo were winning. Contacted Twilio customer support with the data and they "changed some routes" and deliverability was much better, outperforming Nexmo by some margin.

Lesson learned: Create a test case, then contact support with evidence. It's a lot more effort of course, but now I have a system which can flawlessly switch between services if one begins to fail, and Twilio were much more inclined to help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twilio is a great product in my opinion, i have used them in a number of large projects. I am surprised they aren't in the black yet. I figured streamlining and then reselling access to telephony and mobile networks would be pretty profitable.

</comment><comment><USER17> that announcement is phony ;)

seriously though, twillio is a great product, cheers to them!

</comment><comment><USER18> Keep pumping.. all the way until series Z and then pop the balloon.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a highly condensed version of the book "A New kind of Science"? - real-hacker I heard there are some insights in the NKS book, but the 1100 pages filled with a big ego is really not worth my time.
Is there a condensed version of this book, or maybe a better book for cellular automata? <comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion, there is not a better book on Wolfram's ideas than Wolfram's. The text is very readable. The illustrations are sharp and clear. The coverage of the topic is comprehensive. Wolfram's book reflects many years of hard work _writing_.

<comment> real-hacker Thanks. But I read some really negative review of the book in HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713352). And the first Chapter talks about revolution and solving every problem, which sounds like exaggeration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bashing Wolfram's personality is an easy way to get attention on the internet. Most people who do so did not study with Feynman, build software that altered the way scientists are able to use mathematics, or build and run a successful bootstrapped technology company for three decades. Or write a book explaining a sophisticated original idea.

My hunch is that Wolfram's work shares some sort of fundamental mathematical relationship to current advances in machine learning using neural networks. Independent of my hunch, I don't deny that Wolfram could be wrong. But I believe there is a non-trivial possibility that he is on to something important even though it may not be apparent for many years. This was the case with Boole.

There are plenty of excuses not to read his book and most people don't. Not reading doesn't prevent talking about it and joining when people are bashing Wolfram.

Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Macbook Pro or Air for web development - <AUTHOR>

Hey hackers
I would like to hear yours opinions about if you should buy the macbook pro or air? We are talking 13"
I am a little bit split: The air has a bigger screen resolution - 13" They have the same graphics
There is a difference of .7 Ghz between. It is that big a difference?
The Air has a clearly faster I/O with the SSD.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Having used both, I strongly recommend the Air. It's more than capable of being one's primary machine for web development and the difference in portability and daily speed is dramatic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have choosen the macbook air, thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had pretty much the same dilemma six months ago, finally I went with the 13" Macbook Pro w/ 8Gb RAM and 512Gb SSD. It changed my day to day life (but I also need my machine to do some heavy data crunching while on the go, so the slower processor was a major no for me).

<comment><AUTHOR> I would also do the same thing, but i do not have that much money in my own company at this point :) Thanks for your view!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The MacBook Air is my personal preference. Your points, all seem to point to the Air except for the .7 Ghz,

>There is a difference of .7 Ghz between. It is that big a difference?

no.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think i choose the air. Thanks for your advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Got my air a couple of months ago and got rid of my desktop last month. The air is all I use now and I love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think i am going for the air. It is so much prettier! :p</comment></comment>


Was Einstein bright? - <AUTHOR> http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2010/06/15/was-einstein-bright/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+VentureChronicles+(Venture+Chronicles)

<comment><USER2> What this post calls "brightness," I call "ingenuity"—the process of coming up with good ideas that didn't previously exist. It's not really something society calls for very often (other than in entrepreneurial or R&D positions.) It's also the thing that "manhole cover questions" test—so if you can't imagine a company asking you that sort of question, they probably aren't that interested in you for the ingenuity you command.

Rather, what _society_ wants is "intelligence"—the ability to iterate quickly on a problem, efficiently searching the space of solutions/ideas _you already have_ to find one that is most likely to succeed. This is what is measured by IQ, and mostly comes from the ability to focus rationally on the search, instead of derailing oneself with biases or status-grabs. "Knowledge workers" are simply workers who rely on their intelligence. But look at the average knowledge worker, and you won't see much "brightness."

As a note to anyone who wants to be more "bright", because it _is_ useful to _us_ here at HN: ingenuity is formed by two skills—creativity, and critical thought. If they are developed in parallel (creativity by learning new facts to synthesize—usually by observation, but esp. from books, criticism by receiving quantitative feedback on the values of facts and beliefs—usually from conversation with peers, but esp. in school) ingenuity thrives; if one or the other races ahead, ingenuity stalls. Too much criticism, you get conformity and social anxiety; too little and you get arrogance, and an output resembling the aesthetic wasteland of 4chan's /b/. Take the middle way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comments by Einstein about his own schooling, and his approach to self- education:

<http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html>

Key point: school almost turned off Einstein to physics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sometime it's not how intelligent you are, but your knowledge, that make the differences. Your intelligence is not very useful if you don't make use of it to pursue the truth no matter where it leads.

If your brain spent its time rationalizing all your excuses and your failures, than you have nothing but to blame yourself.

Outsider perspective are mostly wrong most of the time, but sometime the outsider get it right, on a massive scale.

The matters of becoming the massively right outsider, I think, is the most difficult part. It's something that I have not figure out.

</comment><comment><USER5> Without knowing the subject matter well it can be difficult to distinguish between someone who is lucid and someone who is merely glib. Both can seem equally "bright". Also, without knowing the person well, it can be difficult to distinguish between pensive, cautious and dim.</comment>